22 Quotes That Take You Inside Elon Musk's Brilliant, Eccentric Mind

When Robert Downey Jr. found out that he was going to play Iron Man in the movies, he said, "We need to sit down with Elon Musk."

That's because Musk — colonizer of Mars, transformer of cars, shepherd of solar panels — is the closest thing we've got to a superhero.

Born in South Africa, he sold his first software — a game called Blastar — when he was only 11. He went on to found and sell a startup to Compaq for $300 million in 1999, and parlayed that into a major stake in PayPal, which eBay bought for $1.5 billion in 2002.

With that dough, he got into three world-changing companies: Tesla, SpaceX, and Solar City. And though Tesla and SpaceX nearly went bankrupt, each of the companies is now shifting their industries.

Yet Musk — with his 100-hour workweeks, estimated $11.7 billion net worth, and habit of never taking a note in meetings — remains enigmatic. So we went looking for clues to his vision, goals, and thinking process.

Here's what we found.

On finding your own education

AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

"My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment — my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.

"When I asked for an explanation, I got the true explanation of how things work. I also did things like make model rockets, and in South Africa there were no premade rockets: I had to go to the chemist and get the ingredients for rocket fuel, mix it, put it in a pipe."

On his favorite book when he was a teen, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

On vision

Getty Images

"Going from PayPal, I thought well, what are some of the other problems that are likely to most affect the future of humanity? Not from the perspective, 'what's the best way to make money,' which is okay, but, it was really 'what do I think is going to most affect the future of humanity.'"

On (not) taking time off

"I did reasonably well from PayPal. I was the largest shareholder in the company and we were acquired for about a billion and a half in stock and then the stock doubled.

"So yeah, I did reasonably well, but the idea of lying on a beach as my main thing, just sounds like the worst — it sounds horrible to me. I would go bonkers. I would have to be on serious drugs. I'd be super-duper bored. I like high intensity."

On thinking rigorously

On the uselessness of process

REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

"I don't believe in process. In fact, when I interview a potential employee and he or she says that 'it's all about the process,' I see that as a bad sign.

"The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You're encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren't that smart, who aren't that creative."

On the importance of talent

AP

"Talent is extremely important. It's like a sports team, the team that has the best individual player will often win, but then there’s a multiplier from how those players work together and the strategy they employ."

On how to attract talent

AP

"You have to have a very compelling goal for the company. If you put yourself in the shoes of someones who's talented at a world level, they have to believe that there’s potential for a great outcome and believe in the leader of the company, that you’re the right guy to work with. That can be a difficult thing, especially if you’re trying to attract people from other companies."

On flying cars

"I've thought about it quite a lot ... We could definitely make a flying car – but that's not the hard part ... The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that's super safe and quiet? Because if it's a howler, you're going to make people very unhappy."

On why the status quo is maintained

On when he first decided to go into space

AP

"The thing that I got hung up on was the rocket. Getting there in the first place. The U.S. options from Boeing and Lockheed were simply too expensive. I couldn't afford them. So, I went to Russia three times to negotiate purchasing an ICBM."

On aiming for Mars

60 Minutes

"There's a fundamental difference, if you look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization, that's out there exploring the stars … compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event."

On building a reusable rocket

"If humanity is to become multi-planetary, the fundamental breakthrough that needs to occur in rocketry is a rapidly and completely reusable rocket ... achieving it would be on a par with what the Wright brothers did. It's the fundamental thing that's necessary for humanity to become a space-faring civilization. America would never have been colonized if ships weren't reusable."

On his philosophical outlook

Reuters

"I came to the conclusion that we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask. Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment."